I noticed that in your archive, the sole maps you have comments on are the Fiffy maps.

Those are certainly old skool, but he made them in 1996 when everyone was doing "box style".

Would you believe his AOL members website in the 1996 readme.txt's STILL WORKS.

That guy deserves a medal for continuity. 

Deserves to be shot.

By SPD you mean this right> http://www.planetquake.com/teamshambler/rev010522.html ?

Second about the Anonca base ones. Not that great though.

People should keep making innovatively styled maps I reckon. Most mapping these days is good enough to pull off some high quality weird shit. 

Those were "action maps" made back in 1996 when all the Quake maps were primitive. You can't fault a guy for operating within his time.

The things you can do with map making tools today are incredible, but those tools and the documentation didn't exist back then.

I read something about it taking DAYS to compile maps (vis? or was it light that was REAL slow on old computers) back in the old days.

They were working with stone-age tools back then. They didn't have vertex manipulation and all the cool stuff. 

I reckon the number one reason there is not more variety in map themes comes down to the textures that are available for Q1.

The vast majority of textures available in .wad format (both amatuer work and stuff ripped from other games) is either tech or medieval. For the most part the textures available don't stray too far from those themes (except for the occasional diversion which suits the quake palette well, e.g. Egyptian).

Yes, there are a few texture wads floating around which feature other styles, but for the most part, they simply just aren't good enough - artistically and/or technically (i.e. bad conversion jobs, unsuitable palettes, etc).

The Quake palette itself is a large part of the problem. If 250 shades of brown don't suit your intended theme, you might be in trouble. You can get very good results using a different palette and colormap though, so I'm a little surprised more people don't do that.

Actually, I'm really not all that surprised, since you'd need a mod to use a new palette gracefully, and more to the point, it takes a bloody good artist to take advantage of that fact. And with a few notable exceptions in the past, there just hasn't been any fantabulous artists out there dedicated to providing us with wonderful new textures. 

By SPD he means this: http://www.planetquake.com/underworld/quakerev031025.html 

Does anyone have the few reviews that was made at "TeamFern" some years ago? 

I wasn't aware you could change the palette.

I was looking at recently Open Sourced X-Men mod for Quake 1 and they seemed to be able to do a lot more with the textures than I thought the palette would permit.

Looking at it, they have a palette.lmp sitting in the quake\xmen\gfx folder

What is the best program to edit the lmp files?

I've looked around in the past and this is probably the last Quake mystery I haven't found an answer to.

refs:

(X-Men mod)
http://www.zerogravity.com.au/xmen/
http://www.quaketerminus.com (News source) 

I just started writing mini reviews/comments on the maps. There are some maps in the "Crap!" category, these are already reviewed. The fiffy maps are just the only maps that I reviewed already and that are no crap in my opinion :D


For easier access to the huge list:
http://www.quaddicted.com/component/option,com_files 

I've never been able to get a custom palette to work either. QMe has a few features for working with custom palette, you might wanna grab that, and let us know if you get it to work. Adquedit is probably a good bet for the actual implementation.

The main problem with changing the palette is that all the other models in quake have to use the same palette as the textures do. So unless you choose the colours very carefully you'll have to reskin all the models you want to use. I expect that's always been a bigger sticking point than the technical side of things. 

GLQuake doesn't appear to even use the palette or colormap. (I did delete the glquake folder). Switched out the palette; no effect. Tried a couple of different engines, none of them even took notice something changed.

WinQuake did use the palette. Everything looked wrong.

I'm not sure what to make of this.

TexMex, the WAD editor recommended here (and it works great), seems to be hardcoded to force the Quake 1 palette (couldn't find anything useful in options).

So ... it might be very challenging to build a WAD that uses a non-Quake256 color palette. 

Whatever I didn't do to get GL to work right, I fixed.

However, everything from the HUD to textures to models were affected.

It would almost require a total conversion to use any palette other than the standard Quake palette. You'd have to reskin all the models and the remake/redesign HUD elements. 

does indeed use the palette.lmp file; this is e.g. the file that idgamma manipulates. It must be put in the gfx subdir of the current game dir, e.g. id1\gfx. If using pak files, make sure case matches as paks are (like unix) case sensitive.

Also, remember resource search order; first pak files in descending order, then files, then same in basedir (usually id1).

For weird mods that changes the palette, try lomgoat or vile. And don't tell me I didn't warn you ... Gameplay is OK though. 

I remember not long after Q2 came out I stuck the q2 palette into q1 to use q2 textures without having to convert them.

Turned out badly.

Very badly. 

I'm a little surprised more people don't do that.

because if you change the palette, you need to have a TC because all the monsters and such will have their skins screwed up because the colours will be different.

that means as well as making new textures, you need to redo all the skins for all the models. have fun. :P 

not to mention all the UI graphics.

you need to have a TC because should be <you need to have nearly a TC because 

I always reckoned a good, simple mod would be to make a palette with all the same "value" as the original colours, but all as a shade of sepia. That way you could have old black and white quake, or noir quake if you're looking for a catchier name. In theory all the textures should just work straight away like this, they'd look black and white. But then I ran into the same problem that glquake wouldn't load the palette and at the same time discovered my card could do the sepia effect on 3D through the graphics options, so I had a look at how it was for a bit and then forgot about the idea.

But I suppose it would make for a stylised map, and you could convert textures across easier as you'd only have to worry in greyscale. So someone might want to give it a shot, if you figure out what it takes to make glquake load it please say. I thought of a few other ways you could get around the difficulty of using a custom palette. One would be to just tint the palette for effect, or to match the colours or mood of some textures you want to convert more closely. That way the models would all be reasonably well matched, you could do a firey red tint for a hellish map or something. This might end up look crap though, especially if you overdo it to make textures match.

A more conservative, but potentially useful way would be to only change some of the rows in the palette. The two pink/purple rows are pretty safe to change in terms of use by monsters, and the horrible bright blue one near the bottom. You could even have a look at the bottom fullbright row - I'm pretty sure there's a way to make them non fullbright in game, and they aren't really used outside map textures. So if you had textures with a strong colour that's poorly matched in the regular quake pallette, like orange, replacing one of those rows with a row of a suitable shade would probably work well.

If you go down this route, I'd recommend sticking to one colour per row, and to also keep the same pattern of light to dark going. Mainly because when colours get dark, they can get mixed in a lot - the lightest bright blue is rarely used, but the darker tones could quite easily be included in the shadowy recesses of a model. If you replace those colours with a similarly dark tone it'll go unnoticed, fullbright orange in the shadows less so. If the worst comes to the worst and a few models have some ugly pixels, you can fix them in QMe quite easily. From the palette editor right click on the colour you want to get rid of, select replace and then select something that works, it'll replace through the whole skin. 

"I remember making my first map in aftershock's toolbox/ deathmatch maker pro thingie. Quite unsophisticated, but it taught me the basics!"

What? Aftershock came with thred and not dmm! Like czg aftershock was what got me into quake mapping, I had done some minor things with doom and then when I saw the aftershock box with screenshots of thred on the back at some silly game expo - I just had to get it because the thought of getting to build levels in full 3d seemed like the most awesome thing ever. 

I guess I got the aftershock pack and never used the editor included.
Or maybe I did; I was young back then! 

I kinda forgot about that. Changing the palette radically also requires changing the HUD graphics, model textures, pickup textures and every other damn texture in the game to match the new palette.

Which is, of course, precisely the reason more people don't do it.

Now, an engine which allowed you to have abitrary palettes for the HUD, monsters, pickups, level etc would give people much more freedom to change the look of the parts of the game they were willing (and able) to edit. 

thanks for all the links :P, they really help. 

Here's how to make a new palette and get it into the game.

Extract the palette from your textures.

This particular method requires Photoshop.

1. Open Photoshop and go File > Automate > Contact sheet.
2. Adjust the document settings to fit all your textures. Set the 'source images' folder to the directory where all of your textures live, then hit ok.
3. Once the contact sheet is ready, go Image > Mode > Indexed color.
4. Then go Image > Mode > color table.
5. Use the SAVE button on that dialogue and save the file as a .PAL file.

You now have your new palette. The next step is to get it into a .wad file with your new textures.

Make the wad file.

You need TexMex this time. TexMex DOES default to the Quake palette, but this will be overriden if there is a PALETTE entry in the wad file.

1. Open TexMex and go File > New.
2. Right click inside the WAD file view and go load > palette.
3. Browse to your new .PAL file and load it.
4. Import your new textures using File > Import.
5. Save the .WAD file.

p.s. go view/preferences and change the Remip method to 'TexMex original'. Its much better than the RemipDLX method.

Export the palette as an LMP file.

While you're still in TexMex, do this:

1. Right click the PALETTE item.
2. Select Export > LMP.
3. Save it as palette.lmp - you MUST use that specific filename.

Generate a colormap from your LMP file.

You must make a colormap for this palette, or your colours will be completely fucked in-game. The only way I know how to do this successfully is using Adquedit. Its a bitch to set up, but assuming you already have it working...

1. Put your palette.lmp somewhere you can find it in Adquedit.
2. Browse to the file in Adquedit. Double click it.
3. It will ask, do you want to make a colormap? You know the answer.
4. Use the default values and hit OK.
5. It should save the colormap into the same directory as the palette.

Make a new PAK file for your palette and colormap.

Use PakScape or whatever you usually use.

1. Make a new PAK file.
2. Make a GFX directory.
3. Import the palette.lmp and colormap into the GFX directory.
4. Save the file as pak2.pak or whatever (you know the rules).

Your pak file is ready to go.

Put the pak2.pak file in your ID1 directory.

If you already have a pak file with a palette inside (e.g. idgamma palette), then rename it or remove it temporarily.

Build a BSP with the new WAD file.

Make a map using the textures in the new WAD file and compile the BSP.

Load that sucker in Quake.

You're done. If you've done everything right, you should be seeing your map with its lovely new palette. Hurrah.

Looking at all those steps, its no wonder people don't do this shit even if you could have a new palette just for the level. 

if anyone made a decent level with that theme, I'd be all over them :)

On another note, so does using IDGAMMA change the palette ? I use it and dont notice too much wrong with how the monsters etc look, in fact I think quake in general looks better and more vibrant in color. 

Nice tutorial. 

yeah, idgamma basically just changes the original palette colours for more vibrant ones. 

you can change/disable the fullbrights by editing colormap.lmp, which is basically a lookup table for the software renderer to calculate light values per pixel. There are 256 columns and 32 rows, so there's an entry for each texture pixel color mixed with each lightmap level. This file is also the place where the 2x overbright lighting of software quake is generated. And you should be aware that the colormap is itself an 8-bit image that uses the same palette that the textures do. So you can see how a completely different palette can truly screw up software quake.

However, this file is totally ignored by glquake (which doesn't have overbright or fullbrights,) and also by any GL engine that does support overbright and fullbrights like fitzquake or darkplaces. So if you edit this file, your changes will not have any effect in a non-software engine.